Veronica says she knew him when he was a young seminarian and that the world, and Inverness County in particular, would be a far better place if he’d stuck to his vocation to be a priest.
“After all the great politicians that came out of Inverness County, now we have Nunn!”
During the election of 1953, a half-ton truck drove through the village, and standing in the back was J. Clyde Nunn and a stranger who was playing the bagpipes.
They say Clyde Nunn will be the member for Inverness until Judgment Day. But of course they were also saying that Angus L. would be the premier of the province forever. All things change eventually.
Right at six o’clock this huge Euclid pulls up on the other side of the gap, swings wide, then starts to back to the edge. There is a murmur of expectation from the crowd of onlookers, who seem to know exactly what is going on. The photographer moves forward, towards the edge of the point, as if he’s going to climb right down to the raging water. This could be the one, everybody seems to be thinking. Jackie, Billy, and I follow the photographer.
The truck stops, but nothing happens. Then I can see the driver of the truck climbing down from his high perch in the cab. He begins to talk to another worker. Then a small crowd gathers around the truck. First I think they’re waiting for some signal before they dump the last load. But then the driver climbs under the truck and then somebody comes with a light. Before you know it, there are three people under the truck. And because I know something about trucks, I instantly know the problem.
In the summer on days when there was nothing much to do, I’d walk down to Newtown and wait beside the road until I saw my father’s truck, either coming up from the construction site at the canal or heading towards it with a load of gravel from Troy Beach. I’d wave, and he’d stop, and I’d jump in and spend the rest of the day riding with him.
Back and forth over the five miles from the beach to where they were mixing the gravel with sand and cement for the concrete that they’re making for the canal walls. We’d just sit there on opposite sides of the seat, elbows out the open window, and the cool breeze blasting in from the motion of the truck.
My father isn’t much for talking even when he’s with other adults. And adults, generally, don’t have much in common with kids and therefore wouldn’t have much to talk to kids about. I’d try to get things going by asking questions, but he was always able to answer them briefly. And then we’d resume our silence. Plus it was hard to talk over the noise of the truck and the wind roaring in the open windows.
I’d find different ways to ask about the beach and whether we’d still be able to go swimming there after the causeway was finished.
“That’s hard to say,” he’d say, which was one of his most frequent answers.
Or I’d ask him about China and Russia and the Communists, and he’d reply that there were some things that were just too complicated for ordinary mortals to understand. As when they executed Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg in 1953 because they were spying for the Communists.
“Why would they have to be executed for spying?”
“That’s what they do to spies,” he said.
And then he said: “It’s an awful thing.”
“What is?” I wanted to know. “Spying or being executed?”
“The whole shootin’ match,” he said.
Most of the trips were uneventful—you might even say boring. Sitting there in a stuffy truck, driving back and forth over the same five miles. Maybe once in a while, when he had to wait in line at the beach, we’d walk down to the shoreline and see who could skip a flat stone the farthest.
Then there would be the bad luck—the broken axle or the flat tire or the broken drive shaft. And he’d get the tired look and get out of the truck slowly and climb underneath. That’s how I knew ahead of anybody else over here what was going on under the Euclid which was stuck at the end of the causeway.
“Broken drive shaft,” I said.
“You don’t know,” said Jackie Nick.
“Yes, I do,” I assured him.
Billy wanted to know what a drive shaft was, and I explained it was a long thing like a pole that went from the transmission to the universal joint and turned the wheels of the truck.
This I learned from watching my father underneath the truck, grease to the elbows, sweating and swearing quietly in Gaelic. I have never heard my father swear in English, and he swears in Gaelic only when things are going very badly—when the truck is broken down on the side of the road or in the yard at home.
Swearing doesn’t sound as bad in Gaelic as in English.
The holdup at the end of the causeway seems to be serious. Soon there is a lineup of Euclids backed up beyond the disabled truck, and a small crowd standing around watching the men on the ground. On this side, all the important men standing around the lieutenant governor are frowning and muttering. I imagine that the air is blue from the language they’re using over there underneath the Euclid.
Occasionally during our drives, and when everything was going well, my father would tell me a story about the mountain when he was young and how being a boy back then wasn’t much different from being a man. You started doing a man’s work even though you were small because all you had to live on was what you were able to scrape off the land or from the woods.
And I asked him if that was why he never went to school, and he replied that school was a whole other kettle offish, whatever that means.
And he’d always say the same thing: “I had no shortage of schooling; it was just the book l’arnin’ I missed out on.”
And he’d laugh the way they do when you’re supposed to laugh with them.
Then, out of the blue, he’d tell a real story.
He and his brother John Dan went hunting rabbits one Sunday, which was against the rules because Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest, even though they had to walk about five miles through the woods to Glendale to get to Mass. But hunting rabbits or any other kind of work on the Lord’s Day was forbidden. There’d be war if Grandma Peigeag ever found out. Nobody defied Grandma Peigeag.
Anyway, this Sunday they’re walking along the mountain road with the .22, watching for rabbits, when suddenly they hear this loud, unfamiliar sound. They stopped and, sure enough, it was the sound of a car approaching. A car? On the mountain?
It could mean only one thing—a priest. A priest on his way up to visit the old people.
My father was carrying the .22 and, to hide it from whoever was coming, he jammed it down his pant leg. But the trigger caught on something and the rifle went off. He didn’t feel a thing at first. And sure enough, a car came around a turn and stopped. And it was the priest. He’s sitting there being priestly and asking them questions in Gaelic about who they were and what they were doing. And it was then that my father felt the pain.
The priest moved on, and my father looked down and saw blood oozing around a small black hole in the top of his bare foot. He suddenly felt like throwing up—partly from pain and partly from knowing what was going to happen when his mother found out what he and his brother had been up to.
They both agreed it had to be a secret, but they had to get the bullet out of the foot somehow. When he sat down and lifted the foot for inspection, John Dan declared that he could see a small dark spot under the skin on the sole of the foot and he was sure it was the tip of the bullet. Then he proceeded to dig around the black spot with his jackknife, and, sure enough, it was the bullet. And that was how they got it out.
That was how afraid they were of their mother.
Suddenly there is the loud roar of a diesel engine at the end of the causeway. I can see a huge bulldozer lumbering up to the stalled Euclid. Moments later the bulldozer hauls the truck off to one side, and another loaded truck swings around and backs to the end of the causeway. The massive dump rises slowly, there is a roar, and the boulders tumble into the gap as if in slow motion, splashing and muddying the foam in front of us.
Somebody shouts and points,
and we all press as close as we safely can towards the end of the point. And there they are, the giant rocks just sitting there, clearly visible in the swirling torrent that is now like a furious shallow ditch. A couple of workmen move down over the edge, positioning themselves to leap from rock to rock and become the first humans in history to cross the Strait of Canso without a boat or an airplane. But one of them notices something dramatic. The rocks are rapidly disappearing as the rising tide once again asserts the mastery of the water over man and his machines. They scramble back to safety.
And soon, the fragile bridge of stone is out of sight entirely. A churning watery gap of about twenty feet remains between here and there. The strait will not surrender its integrity so easily—not after so many countless centuries of imposing inconveniences on all the creatures on its shores.
One sunny day in the summer, just after we turn off the main highway onto the dirt road leading to the canal construction, my father stops the truck and points at a new sign that’s been erected there just that day.
“Look at that,” he says, laughing in disbelief.
“What,” I want to know.
“Can’t you see anything wrong with that sign?”
“No,” I reply.
“Read it,” he instructs.
I peer at the big words.
“Caution. Intermitting blasting”?
“Read it again.”
I did. “Caution. Intermitting blasting.”
“What kind of blasting is intermitting blasting?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s because some smart educated fella got the word wrong. It should be ‘intermitt-ent’ blasting.”
“What’s the difference?”
He looked at me briefly, then started the truck again.
“You’re the fella that goes to school,” he said.
Then rapped my knee gently with his knuckle and laughed.
Another time we were just sitting in the cab, waiting in line before he could dump his load of gravel. He had the door open and one leg hanging out and his elbow resting on the steering wheel. We were both watching the same thing: the causeway, now like a fat snake wriggling in our direction.
Then he said, without looking at me: “It’ll still be there long after we’re both gone.”
What?
“That thing is bigger and more important than any of us.”
He sounded sad, but I couldn’t see his face.
I know that lots of people are unhappy about the causeway. The papers are full of alarm from Mulgrave and Port Hawkesbury, where people will lose their jobs when the ferries stop. Mulgrave is worse off because the trains won’t go anywhere near there once the causeway is finished. They say the town will die. And there are people saying that drift ice will back up in St. George’s Bay after the causeway and interfere with the spring lobster fishery. And that the water level will rise four inches, which will be enough to change the shoreline significantly.
South of the new causeway, the strait and Chedabucto Bay will become four degrees warmer and drop a bit, and even that small change will interfere with life in the sea.
At Clough’s store, however, I hear them saying that these are small prices to pay for progress. Port Hawkesbury is going to be a boom town because of the new industries that will locate here and there. And Mulgrave will just have to accept the fact that communities have their ups and downs, as Port Hastings has learned more than a few times in our long history.
Of course, there are also people who are warning of larger consequences from “mankind tampering with nature.” And there has also been some concern that, in the next war, the causeway will be a target because of its strategic importance for the steel and coal industries on the other side of Cape Breton. But some people are saying there can never be another big war like the two world wars in the first half of this century. A war now would mean the end of the world because of the hydrogen bombs they’re building.
I’m not so sure. Every day the papers are full of stories about Americans and Russians and Chinese threatening each other over one thing or another. Old John is sure there will be another great war in Europe. And I know from the papers that the Americans killed Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg for something that would have helped the Russians win it.
My father says people are essentially nutty and, as a result, anything is possible. He says that Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg thought that, by spying, they could help prevent a war.
“So why were they electrocuted?”
He just looked at me for a while. “To make small boys ask questions.”
Which is another one of the answers he often gives.
My mother says we have to pray for peace and that this is a good reason for saying the rosary every evening.
My father goes along with the rosary, but when my mother starts adding new stuff, the way she does for peace, you can hear him tapping his foot on the floor, which is his signal that enough is enough.
Grandma Donohue doesn’t seem to be half as worried about the Russians and the Chinese as she is about this guy named Nasser. But she agrees: prayer is the only answer.
It’s good to have your father home, even if you worry about broken axles and drive shafts and the tired look he gets sweating and swearing underneath the truck—which seems to be always looking for new ways to trip him up. And about how, when things really get difficult, he’ll come home late with fishy eyes and a goofy grin and a lot of silly talk that makes my mother angry. And then the house will grow cold and, when they’re alone, you know things are being said. Afterwards he’ll quietly go outside and sit on the doorstep or in the truck, and maybe fall asleep like that.
Friends from the mining days will often drop by when they’re on their way home from somewhere or leaving for another job. They’ll talk quietly about distant places, and he’ll be interested in new shafts that are being sunk and geologists’ reports about how rich some base-metal discovery is going to be in some place nobody ever heard of before. And about people they all know flocking off to the new bonanza in Elliot Lake or Blind River or Arizona. Even I get excited and wonder what it would be like to leave your troubles behind and go off to something entirely new in a place that doesn’t really matter because you’re going to be there only temporarily anyway.
After they leave, you’ll see him sitting at the table with an instant coffee and a cigarette, and sometimes he’ll have a pencil and he’ll be adding things up on the back of an envelope. Then he’ll sigh and put it away.
One of his visitors, in the spring, shortly after he came home, was Angus MacDonald from Long Point. They call him Angus Jim Malcolm, and he’s a prospector, and he actually grew up on MacIntyre’s Mountain too. I was interested in the conversation because I’ve read a lot about prospectors in Western books and the comics.
Angus Jim Malcolm was talking about a murder, so I couldn’t help but listen in.
A friend of his in Quebec had just been charged with murdering some Americans and was going on trial for his life.
I felt a terrible thrill at those words—“on trial for his life.” And I was thinking about those same words as they were used before the Rosenbergs were electrocuted in Sing Sing for being spies.
I’ll always remember who Angus Jim Malcolm was talking about because he had an interesting name—Bill Coffin.
Angus was saying what a nice guy he was, but that he was a terrible thief.
The reason he was blamed for murdering some hunters was because he was caught with stuff that belonged to them. He kept saying they gave it to him, but nobody believes him.
“He’d steal the eyes out of you, but he wouldn’t kill a fly,” said Angus Jim Malcolm.
And the men in the kitchen all agreed that Coffin was innocent, but that he was in deep trouble because he was an Englishman in Quebec and because the dead people were Americans.
When the visitor was gone, I asked my father if Angus Jim Malcolm’s friend Coffin was going to be electrocuted, and my father said no
, we don’t do that here.
“What do we do here?”
“We hang them.”
For all his troubles, my father is happier at home. You can tell he loves to sit there at his end of the table, eating his sgadan (salt herring) and blue potatoes or his corned beef and cabbage like a starved man. Or lying on the kitchen lounge listening to Fun at Five or the fiddle music and making a dark worn spot on the wall where he leans his head. And playing cribbage with my mother in the evenings, going to bed for a nap on Sunday afternoons, and, when it rains, going out and sitting in the truck just to listen to the rain rattling on the roof. He says he loves the sound and that it makes him sleepy, because, when he was a boy on the mountain, there was no ceiling in the bedroom where he and John Dan slept and they’d be listening to the rain and the hail and they’d think how lucky they were to be under a roof and not like the poor people who didn’t even have places to live.
“Being poor is having neither pot to piss in nor window to throw it out through,” they say.
We both love the sound of the wind in the big poplar trees that seem to surround our house—constantly rustling and sighing as you slide off into the magical world of sleep where anything is possible.
All July we were following the Coffin trial in Quebec because we knew somebody who knew him. Every day the paper would have a story, and every day Coffin looked worse. They were even trying to get his common-law wife to testify against him because, according to the lawyers who opposed him, a common-law wife doesn’t matter the way a real wife does. Everybody knows real wives aren’t supposed to testify against their husbands.
Coffin’s lawyers were trying to force the other side to tell them who else they had as witnesses against him. The judge thought that would set “a dangerous precedent.” Everything was complicated by the fact that they had to use both English and French because some witnesses couldn’t speak one or the other language. Coffin could speak only English and, because of that, my mother said, he’s as good as hanged already.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 16